‘The Core’: Al Jazeera rolls out AI system for news production

Al Jazeera Media Network has announced a new ArtificiaI Intelligence initiative, developed in partnership with Google Cloud aimed at integrating AI more deeply into newsroom operations.

The project, named “The Core,” was announced on December 15 as an integrative AI‑driven model designed to AI's role in journalism from a passive tool to an active partner in news production, while retaining editorial control.

According to Al Jazeera and Google Cloud, The Core integrates Google’s AI suite across six interdependent pillars that form the system’s backbone. These include:

• AJ Now: a central platform that assists with suggesting questions, generating angles and drafting summaries, which will use Google Cloud's compute engine, Gemini Enterprise, Vertex AI Search and other generative tools.
• AJ‑LLM (Editorial Brain): a large language model (LLM) fine‑tuned on Al Jazeera’s own archives to help with translation, summarisation and real‑time contextual analysis.
• AJ Vision: supports immersive content creation with generative AI tools, including Imagen, Veo, and others.
• AJ Data Lake: uses data analytics to uncover trends and support data‑driven reporting using BigQuery and Gemini Data Agents.
• Operations Engine: focused on automating internal workflows through Gemini for Workspace.
• Academic and Knowledge Arm: Offers training for journalists on advanced AI tools.

Some observers have raised questions about potential bias associated with the use of Google Cloud, citing the company’s broader regional technology partnerships, including Project Nimbus. Al Jazeera has said the system’s language model will be trained on its own editorial archives and remain under continuous human oversight, which it says will help mitigate such concerns.

Sheikh Nasser bin Faisal Al Thani, director general of Al Jazeera Media Network, said the initiative reflected the organisation’s ambition to build “a global technological ecosystem” that strengthens its position in the AI era, while preserving editorial judgment.

Alex Rutter, managing director for AI in Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Google Cloud, said the initiative’s tools were designed to reshape how journalists research, produce and publish news, as well as how audiences engage with it.

Under the expanded partnership, Al Jazeera will deploy Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure and agent-based systems across its global operations. Both organisations stressed that editors and reporters would remain central to all editorial decisions, with AI serving a supporting role.

Details regarding data-centre locations, regional infrastructure and deployment timelines have not been publicly disclosed.